


The Other Side Of Mt. Heart Attack

by hitlikehammers



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universes, Codependency, M/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-04
Updated: 2010-01-04
Packaged: 2017-12-12 05:45:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/807968
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hitlikehammers/pseuds/hitlikehammers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No matter when, no matter where, no matter how - they survive for one another; they will always be found.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Other Side Of Mt. Heart Attack

**Author's Note:**

> For [](http://re-white.livejournal.com/profile)[**re_white**](http://re-white.livejournal.com/)'s prompt: [_"something focusing on the notion that Kirk and McCoy take care of each other, that they survive each other *for* each other because there's no one left to do it for them,"_](http://community.livejournal.com/st_santa/9243.html) at the [](http://st-santa.livejournal.com/profile)[](http://st-santa.livejournal.com/)**st_santa** Star Trek SekriT Santa Exchange. **Vague mentions of undisclosed, minor character death. Spoilers for Star Trek XI (2009).** Credit to Liars for the title and the subheader text.
> 
> Also: I’ve taken some rather extensive creative license with the structure and curriculum of medical education and residency for the first part of this fic, and the depiction of procedure in general here is deliberately choppy, improvised, and only-vaguely correct; so I’d advise taking the particulars with a grain of salt.

**_...I won't run far..._ **

 

Running from the facts of life ain’t never solved a thing. S’what his great-aunt Inis always used to say, and for the most part, he’s agreed with her.

They try to prepare you for the worst, for the inevitable day when you will be proved as fallible, as limited, as mortal as the rest of them; the day that disproves you as God is something they tell you to brace for from day fucking one. And Jesus _Christ_ , but he’d thought he’d been ready for it.

But it’s one thing to read about it in the textbooks, to hear about it from his own father, to watch it mirrored, that darkness on his features like a pestilence, a plague. It’s another thing entirely to have that blood on your hands, to see the proof painted like the scarlet fucking letter, telling you it’s your fault that a heart isn’t beating anymore, _your_ fault a soul has fled this world to whatever does or doesn’t await it beyond; it’s a whole world of fucking difference, to feel like a murderer when there’s one less life in the room, to see that loss in _your_ eyes when you stare at your reflection.

So he’s taken his roommate’s ancient pickup and lit the fuck out of anywhere, _everywhere_ , aching for the horizon as it dims and hoping that it swallows him whole before the tank runs out.

He’s a quarter-ways toward ‘E’ when he nearly pops the tires on a mangled scrap of metal in the middle of the dusty road. The brakes squeal with strain and lack of use, and it only takes a moment for Leonard to notice the divots in the ground where the bike - it’s a bike, an old one, gnarled in his path - seems to have slid away from a tree near the roadside that’s worse off for the wear. He gets out of the car, whistling low when he sees the damage reflected in the headlights, wandering to the tree-trunk where the bark’s half gone, torn to shreds and burning against Leonard’s hand when he moves closer reaches to touch. His gaze shifts, though, when he hears a harsh moan, too close to him, too human to be anything but; his eyes follow the echo, land quickly on a spot near the ground that rejects the moonlight - solid, still. The casualty of the battle.

“Shit!” And Leonard sprints the few yards it takes for proximity to reveal not just a shadow, but a person, a boy, lying alone, prone on the ground.

“Jesus,” Leonard mutters under his breath, taking in the surface damage, the way the kid’s shirt’s ripped, the dried blood speckling his face from various lacerations, the way he’s sprawled like a rag-doll, thrown from the fire.

“Should see th’other guy,” the boy barely slurs, eyes unfocused as he seems to slip in and out of the present; judging by the way the wreckage is still smoking, the way the bark on the tree still stung with friction-heat against his palm, the kid can’t have been out here on his own for long. Thank god.

“Hey, hey,” he slaps at the kid’s cheek a little, just until those eyelids flutter, return to the now, and he curses his thoughtlessness, his recklessness - the both of them, strangers and fools; of all the nights not to bring a goddamned thing with him: not a tricorder, not an empty hypo, not a fucking roll of gauze. “Don’t go noddin’ off on me.”

He runs the tables, the diagrams through his mind like clockwork, counting off the classic protocols for basic physical trauma like the fucking flash cards he’d studied them on; tries to keep his own heart rate down, because he’s good - he’s damn fucking _good_ , else he wouldn’t be where he is, doing what he does - but he’s young, still a greenhorn; half the shit he’s done, he’s only run it through a sim - never had a real, living _person_ caught beneath his hands in a situation like this. Six months out of med school, for fuck’s sake, and the man who’d bled out on the table that evening - and _Jesus_ , Leonard doesn’t even remember his name - he’d been the first trauma they’d seen in _weeks_.

But the kid’s pulse strong, steady under Leonard’s fingertips - enough to rule out some of the worst possibilities running through his mind - and the skin beneath his touch is warm; and even if they don’t teach enough of this, anymore - they don’t you teach how to actually _do_ this shit with your _hands_ , without the scanners and the machines - he tries to remember what his dad would do. His dad, who always was and always would be just an old-time country doctor, who’d just as soon hypospray you as he’d feed your fever or starve your cold. Or... vice versa. Leonard’d never actually understood the idea, either way.

“Still with me?” he asks when the boy remains quiet, more still than he should be; he notes the way he seems to rasp, seems to struggle with the air in his lungs, and god _damn_ , but he’d kill for a fucking scanner; it doesn’t make any sense, but panic starts to swell in his gut again, every impossible possibility for why the kid might struggle, might wrestle for breath racing through his head as the kid shakes his head, blinks twice before he groans again, the sound too strangled for his comfort, for Leonard’s liking.

He has a flash of memory, of his father’s ear leaned against his chest when Leonard had contracted pneumonia as a boy. He feels like an idiot for even considering it, but he thinks of his father, draped in his lab coat with his stethoscope around his neck and his tricorder in his pocket, telling Leonard that _‘you do the best you can with what you have, and if what you have is nothing, you just do the best you can.’_ He knows, knows beyond the shadow of a doubt that _that_ man would never have thought twice, not when it had half-a-chance in hell of helping, of working. And so with nothing, he leans over the kid’s chest, his torn and tattered tee-shirt rough against Leonard’s cheek, and he listens the very best that he can.

And his breath sounds are normal, equal on both sides, and the kid’s chest is rising evenly enough, and for the very first time, Leonard feels relief, feels confidence in his observations, his conclusions without a chirping box of wires and probes reassuring him, holding his hand. But Leonard doesn’t fail to notice the way the kid flinches when he touches him, when he gets too close; he puts the why of it out of his mind as he straightens, focuses instead on the growing, flickering realization in the boy’s blue eyes, blue enough to see in the dark - the fear that’s starting to spark, smolder in those crystalline irises, a fire Leonard feels obligated, charged with extinguishing, with putting to rest.

“It’s okay, kid,” he speaks softly, lets his drawl seep into his words in a low rasp, slow like honey; “My name’s Leonard, and I’m gonna take care of ya, alright?”

Running questing hands up the boys sides in quick assessment, he gets a throaty groan in response.

“Does that hurt?” he asks, slowing to better gauge the tenderness, the extent of the injury, trying not to cause more pain than necessary.

“Doesn’t feel good, if that’s what you were trying for.” Leonard allows himself a bit of a smirk at the snark there, the suggestive lilt of humor, and what’s left of his worry finally starts to ebb.

“How badly?” he asks, peeling what’s left of his shirt up to better inspect the damage.

“S’sore, mostly. Like I got the crap kicked outta me.” Leonard wonders for a moment just how often this kid might have gotten the ‘crap kicked out of him,’ and scowls as he runs his fingers over the boy’s ribs, squints against the growing dark to see where new bruises are covering old ones, just barely visible, rings around the bull’s-eye. “‘Cept my arm,” he hisses as he shifts his weight a little, and Leonard notices now the way he’s cradling the limb to his side; feels like a fucking idiot novice for not seeing it, checking it before. “That hurts like a bitch.”

And that makes fucking _sense_ , Leonard thinks in retrospect, rolling his eyes behind the lids - why the kid might have struggled to breathe against the pain. He looks to the swelling, the obvious signs of injury at the forearm; glances back at the wreckage of the motorcycle, tries to see in his mind how the impact occurred, where the kid would have gone down, how he might have hit, and - yes. That makes sense. Kid’s barely old enough to drive the goddamned thing in the first place; squinting through to that baby face, hidden underneath scrapes and bruises, drizzled in blood - the reckless son of a bitch can’t be more than fifteen. At the most.

He tries to remember himself at fifteen, tries to imagine himself miles from home, without his family, on a fucking bike he’s too damn young to drive - it doesn’t add up.

“What’s your name, Evel Knievel?” he asks, eyes flickering to meet the kid’s as Leonard starts to unbutton his shirt, suppressing a little shiver that’s only half to due with the cool as it seeps through the wife-beater he wears underneath. He knows well enough what a sling looks like, for never having actually used one himself or in his practice, and he’s pretty damn sure he can make one work until they get the kid to an osteo-regenerator.

“Jim,” the kid answers with a hitch, but his tone is strong, proud.

“You’re gonna be fine, Jim. Aside from what looks like a pretty damn good break,” he gestures at Jim’s left forearm as he cradles the kid’s arm in the bulk of his button down, carefully pulling the sleeves as best he can to secure at his neck, so that the arm is suspended high enough, tight enough against his chest; “and maybe a mild concussion at worst, your little stunt here was mostly all bark and no bite. We just gotta get you back to civilization and get you patched up.”

He raises himself in a crouch, giving Jim a once over before leaning closer; “Can you walk?”

“If you can help me stand,” Jim admits after a moment of careful consideration, with a strength, a sort of wisdom that Leonard feels immediately drawn to, immediately awed by, and when he carefully slides an arm around the kid’s shoulders, bears as much of his weight as he can as they shuffle towards the truck, as he loads his charge into the front seat, he prays for a miracle that they’ll make it back before the gas runs out.

“Where you from, Jim?” he asks suddenly, halfway back to the city and a needle’s twitch closer to empty, when he notices the kid starting to slump into the seatbelt.

“‘Nnnmm,” he groans as he slides up the door, careful of his makeshift sling; “‘owa.”

“And what brings you to the Deep South, Jim from Iowa?”

“Dunno.” He arches his back a little, sinking deeper into the give of the seat. “Just runnin’.”

 _That makes two of us, kid._ “Whatcha running from?”

The kid chuckles, but it’s a sad, bitter sound; his eyes, though, they seem clearer, focused on the smolder at the horizon line, the last hints of light before they fade. “Same thing ev’ryone runs from,” he says, and his voice is soft, unimposing, but it resonates, echoes in the empty places around Leonard’s chest like an omen, a truth deeper than death; “The things you can’t change.”

Leonard swallows hard, more than once, tries to find his voice, find a way out from under the weight that’s crushing his lungs. “How’d you total your bike?”

The kid grins, and the width of it’s a little magnificent, even if it reopens the slice in his cheek - he’ll need the dermal at least once over for that, Leonard suspects. “S’not my bike.”

Leonard rolls his eyes, but only just, taking the truck up another fifteen miles per hour, just enough so that it rattles beneath the hood; just enough so that he’d probably get his driving privileges revoked if he got caught pushing such speeds. “How’d you total _the_ bike, smartass?”

If possible, the kid’s smirk widens further, the split in his lip cracking again, coloring the peek of his gums too red. “Ran it into a tree.”

Leonard fights his own grin at the cheek of the boy, in spite of his pain - maybe, he ventures, _because_ of it. “Now why’d you go and do a thing like that?”

“That’s easy.” And the kid breaks for a yawn, one that hitches as it shifts his chest enough to disturb his arm. “So I’d be there for you to find.”

They’re silent after that, because impossible as it is, it has a strange sort of symmetry, makes a strange sort of sense.

“Where’re we goin’?” Jim asks, some minutes later, blinking too fast, too many times, like he’s only just waking from a long, deep sleep, the nightmarish end of a dream.

“Hospital,” Leonard answers with a bit of a growl as the city lights loom in the distance. “You’re lucky I just got off my shift, else you’d’ve been sitting ducks for a couple more hours before anyone drove by.”

“You’re a doctor?” Jim asks, with just a hint of particular interest, and Leonard thinks for a minute, thinks where he wouldn’t have before today, before _this night_ , before he replies.

“Workin’ on it,” he answers with a smirk, and it’s the best he can do, really; the best he can do.  
______________

Jim falls asleep after the second round with the osteo-regenerator, and Leonard pulls enough strings to dig up an empty bed for him to stay in while they finish the job. He finds himself enough busywork to pass the night, dropping in more often than he needs to to make sure - doubly, triply, quadruply _sure_ \- that the kid’s just sleeping off exhaustion and not something worse.

With the lights at thirty percent, just a glow as not to disturb Jim as he sleeps (as if anything could, at this point), Leonard settles into the chair next to him, pulls up the records on the PADD balanced against his knees, and finds that the man they’d lost the night before was named Ryan DeLey.

And for as much as he’s scrubbed his skin raw, Leonard’s pretty damn sure that Ryan DeLey’s blood is still laced beneath his fingernails, mingling with Jim from Iowa’s. It’s fitting, Leonard thinks; tragically poetic, and even as it weighs heavy on his heart, it gives him a hope he’d felt bereft without just hours before. Jim had given him that back.

He stands, goes to a supply room he knows will be deserted at this time of night, inching into morning; comms his dad and leaves him a message, telling him thank you; thank you for being a brilliant, crazy country doctor who works with what he has as well as he works with what he lacks, and who knows how to heal with his hands, and not just with what he switches on and holds _in_ his hands. Because it’s his hands themselves that save people’s lives; Leonard’s sure of that, now.

When he gets back to Jim’s room, the boy’s awake, and Leonard takes it upon himself to give the last of his go-arounds with the osteo, prepping the device in silence before Jim breaks it.

“Thanks,” the kid says, awkward and still sleep-hazy, off-focus. “You know... for...” he swallows, closes his eyes; and for the first time, the sensors on the biobed don’t tell Leonard anything he can’t figure out on his own. “Thanks.”

And Leonard smiles, says: “Don’t mention it, Jim;” but what he means to say, what he _needs_ to say, is: _‘No, kid, thank you.’_

_________________________________________

 

_**...If you need me...** _

 

The lights are dim, pasty; he feels a hundred years old under the weight of the world, a thousand under the harsh glow overhead.

The man behind the bar is lean, gives a false impression of lankiness that Leonard suspects would be a fatal one, should you cross him wrong. The way the cotton - good, down-to-earth, home-grown _cotton_ , so soft that Leonard can feel it beneath his fingers even as his skin crawls - hugs the smooth tone of his arms is a rare thing; somehow, the lighting makes him look young, immortal, hides the bruises beneath his eyes and the scars at his jaw that sink low when he lingers in the shadows, turns the straw of his hair to spun-fucking- _gold_ ; makes him more than what he is, less than what he might be.

That man behind the bar.

Leonard doesn’t have to order for that man to know what he wants, what he needs; just has to focus on sitting down at the bar and keeping the cracks, the tears in the leather of the seat from opening up and letting him slide through. It’s strange, the way those eyes seem to understand him, brighter blue than the sky on a clear spring day, just after the rain, but it works, and he’s too damn tired, too heartsick to fight it, to wonder why. It doesn’t matter why, anymore; why doesn’t exist. There is no why.

The glass against his palm is cool, solid, unshakeable - the only thing in his world that _is_ ; everything that he _isn’t_ , doesn’t think he’ll ever be again - and he holds to it like he’s falling off the edge of the world, like it’s his last foothold before the abyss swallows him whole. That glass is his goddamn cornerstone, his anchor. Doesn’t matter what’s inside, just so long as when he holds it, it doesn’t slip away.

“Thanks,” he manages between the last sip he can taste and the first that just kindles the fire where it burns; he fishes out his wallet out, pays before he can’t remember his name anymore, tries not to look at the crumpled photograph, printed with real ink and cut with a pocket knife, rough at the edges and water stained - all he has left of her, all he has left.

“Don’t mention it,” the man behind the bar tells him, and it’s a kindness, goddamnit. A kindness.

He runs out of credits sooner than he wants to - he still knows who he is, where he’s from, what he’s lost - and there’s a sinking feeling in his gut when he thinks about having to start clawing his way out of the haze, out of the subtle film of desperate, foolish nothing that clouds the truth lingering at the back of his consciousness, just waiting to strike, to consume him anew and break him in the hollow places, the fragile places, the places that still haven’t healed; salt in his wounds where the alcohol didn’t quite manage to numb him well enough. The man, though, the one behind the bar - he knows, but he still takes his empties and makes the fulls, lets him drown in them a little longer - longer than he should.

“Would’a been her birthday today,” he flounders, starts to sink, his grasp on reality faltering without the grip, the hold of the glass, the swirl of a world better, simpler than this one inside it; he’s lost, he’s breaking, and the burn in his throat starts to spread, starts to eat him alive.

The man behind the bar doesn’t ask, though, just slides him another drink, another rope in the dark; saves him from himself.

He doesn’t know how to say it, doesn’t think he _can_ , not past the pain, the regret in his chest and the tightness in his throat; but he _wants_ to, desperately. He wants to say it; whatever it is.

He just looks into those eyes like staring into the heart of god and the devil all at once - there’s something there that understands him better than he understands himself, and dulled by the bourbon, the sound of it pounding too hard, too lazy through his veins where his blood stands still; in spite of everything, Leonard thinks, out of everything, this guy _gets_ it.

He stares down into the depths of the glass in his hands, the reflection of his own gaze swimming, uneasy as the amber swirls; he doesn’t drink, just holds on, and he knows that the hours pass, that the bar closes, that people yell out _‘See ya, Jimmy,’_ at intervals that start small and then meander off into nothing, but the man behind the bar never asks him to leave - Leonard’s own personal savior, wiping down the countertop, with eyes like summer rain.

The only thing to disturb the last of his Booker’s is the trembling of his grip, making ripples that swallow the sorrow, that make it hard to see when a lone tear escapes his eye, slides down his bowed cheek and dances through the maze of his stubble; loses itself beneath the waves.

The man behind the counter sees it, though, but knows enough to leave it alone.

_________________________________________

 

**_...I will stay by your side..._ **

 

It’s uncomfortable, the angle he’s at; he tries to shift, tries to settle better into the goddamn mountain of pillows that has slowly accumulated around and behind him as the night’s slipped into dawn, but it’s a futile effort; he’s hacking his lungs out through a throat so inflamed, he can barely breathe in the first place, and at the first sign of trouble - as it’s been for the past eighteen hours and counting - there’s a hand on his, a presence next to him, and a firm, yet careful palm slowly readjusting him, easing him back upon the bed just so, just right, sliding out from behind him to linger against his clammy cheek.

“You suck as a patient, you know that?” his lover mummers with a half smirk, fluffing at the sheets like a mother hen, and it’s odd, because it’s been a long time since someone cared for him like this; and fuck if he’ll admit it, but it’s kinda nice - feels warm in his chest in a way that has nothing to do with the virus raging through him, ransacking his system. “Does Denothiinian Fever mess with your hearing? Because I’m pretty sure I told you to stay the fuck _put_ , and if you needed something, to let me know.” His eyes slide closed as he feels the bed dip beneath his self-appointed nursemaid’s weight, and even though it stings a little, he manages a slight little grin. “Christ, if you _ever_ complain about _me_ again...”

He inadvertently cuts Jim off with another round of coughing, and it’s only because he can’t quite manage it himself that he gives into Jim’s hands, the support of his hold as he eases Leonard into sitting up, holds him steady and rubs tenderly at his back as he presses closer, letting Leonard fit against his chest and feed off the strength of it, the solid rhythm of his breath calming him as he settles, as the wracking of his frame subsides, as he raises a hand to wipe at his mouth, a small smear of red bright against his pale fingers; he’s pretty sure it’s from the dry, angry split in his lip, but that might be wishful thinking.

“Jesus, Bones,” Jim hisses, not missing a beat, and Leonard can feel the way his breath quickens at his back. “You’re _sure_ this is normal?”

“S’fine,” he struggles to say as he struggles for breath, his lungs on fire, his chest sore; “It’ll pass.”

“I don’t believe you.” And it’s the fifth time he’s said it since Leonard had collapsed on his bed getting ready for classes that morning, but he can tell that Jim’s getting more and more worried, more and more scared - and it’s a strange emotion on the face of James Tiberius Kirk, make no mistake - and Leonard’s pretty sure if things don’t start looking up soon, all of his protests that this is normal (which it is), and that it’ll pass (which it will), and that he doesn’t need to go to the clinic (because he _doesn’t_ , goddamnit, he knows what’s happening to him, and he know there’s nothing can be done ‘cept to ride it out), will be for nothing when Jim drags him down to Starfleet Medical and admits his sorry ass out of sheer terror for his roommate, his bedmate, the man he falls asleep against at night.

“Tell me you’re going to be okay,” Jim says softly into his hair, and Leonard feels the ache in his chest change, soften into something affectionate; and he doesn’t know if it’s the passage of time, the virus slowly dying inside, or if it’s just the fact that Jim’s there, and that Leonard knows, _knows_ that he’s not about to leave, but he feels better in that moment - stronger.

“I’ll be fine, Jim,” he manages, keeps his voice steady enough to convey the confidence he feels underneath all the weakness and fatigue - he’s seen this illness come and go enough times to know how it works, and he cares enough for Jim to have bitten the bullet and have turned himself over to his colleagues over in Medical if it had gotten out of hand. “I told you, the whole night shift picked it up from that one Algolian robotics professor we admitted last week. S’one helluva nasty bug, but it don’t last long.” He reaches out, takes Jim’s hand in his and concentrates on feeling every ridge of every knuckles, every line of his palm, because Leonard knows that the touch calms him, keeps him centered. “Give it a few more hours, it’ll run it’s course.”

“I worry,” Jim says softly, leaning his cheek against the top of Leonard’s hair, and the warmth when he exhales penetrates Leonard to the core as he whispers back; “I know.”

A soft whistle from their kitchenette breaks the silence, the spell; “That’ll be your tea,” Jim murmurs, his voice rumbling through his torso under Leonard’s ear. “I even made it by hand, the way you like it.”

Leonard cocks his head a bit, and Jim doesn’t have to see his expression to know it, to chuckle a little sheepishly and press his lips to his lover’s temple as he shifts their weight, makes to move.

“Fine,” Jim concedes, “I _tried_ to make it the way you like it.” He carefully settles Leonard back into the pillows, piled high enough to at least begin to compensate for Jim’s absence in theory, though in practice, they fall abysmally short. “Sit tight, I’ll only be a second.”

“Leave it,” Leonard says suddenly, his voice a slow, creeping plea, and he feels a surge of adrenaline flood him, give him the presence of mind and of body to hold Jim in place, to grip tight enough at his wrist to feel the blood resonate there, throbbing with purpose and resolve. “Stay here.”

Jim stops, stills for a long moment, studying Leonard’s eyes, caressing him with a gaze so full of everything Leonard’s been too afraid to want, before he smiles, steps forward again, settles on the bed and molds himself to Leonard’s side, shoulders to toes. “God, you’re needy,” he teases, pressing closer.

“Mmm,” Leonard smiles, his chin now resting at the crown of Jim’s head. “I’ve-” and Leonard tries to fight the way a soft laugh tears, sears as it rumbles in his chest, through his throat; tries, but fails in the end, the coughing taking over full force before he can choke out the rest in a gasping huff; “learned from the best.”

“Easy,” Jim murmurs, his palm now stroking up and down Leonard’s chest until he calms, until he breathes once more without incident; “easy.”

Leonard takes a series of deep, careful breaths, each measured by Jim’s hand on him, his eyelids heavy again, spent. “Come on,” Jim urges him towards the rest he needs, draping his arm across Leonard’s stomach and settling in, cradled against Leonard’s feverish heat; “tea can wait.”

_________________________________________

 

**_...And I want you to find me..._ **

 

Leonard watches his patient, his lover as he sleeps, breathing now on his own, in the bed that they share instead of one shrieking and beeping with one alarm after another as his systems fail, one after the next, as he flirts with death more determinedly than any sentient being he’s ever tried to lure his way. His chest rises and falls with a gentle, steady cadence now, doesn’t tremble and heave, doesn’t still for minutes on end - minutes that stretch on into infinity without pity, without relent; and yet Leonard can’t get the image of Jim Kirk, dead on his surgical table - motionless and breathless and still, so fucking _still_ \- out of his mind, can’t get over the the tightness in his chest, the way his head spins when he thinks about it, about the hows and the whys and the what-ifs. This - all of this - in the name of innocent, innocuous curiosity.

God damn motherfucking _curiosity_ to the deepest circles of hell, if this was what came of it.

They said they’d only been curious, testing the physical and psychological limits of various species for the sake of reference, in the name of science. Jim had just been the first unlucky human being to walk heedlessly into their grasp. The experimental design was for the equivalent of four standard Earth weeks. They’d found him - what was left of him: a shell, a skeleton of the man himself - brought him back on Day Twenty-Eight. Mere coincidence, really.

Curiosity, that’s all. No more, no less. No nefarious scheme, no cruel and dangerous plot. Nothing but the most human of inclinations, twisted into something foreign, perverse, and turned against the most inquisitive of them all. Curiosity.

Somehow, though; knowing that only makes it all the worse.

His eyes glaze a little as he runs idle fingers through Jim’s hair, relishing the warmth of living flesh and rushing blood beneath, waiting for the tension, the adrenaline to subside; waiting for the fear to ebb and relief to take over. It’s slow in coming, though, and his heart pounds hard, his fingers tremble as he strokes his captain’s brow.

“You keep looking at me like you think I’m gonna disappear.” He should have noticed the shift in his breathing, the way the rhythm hitched, sped, evened out, but his mind is elsewhere, and it’s that voice, that soft, low rumble of warmth where it drifts, settles in Leonard’s gut - those sharp blue eyes that change, that swallow like the tides - that steals the air from the room and levels the ground beneath Leonard’s feet - _finally_ ; and he can breathe again.

“I’m not an idiot,” Jim murmurs when Leonard says nothing - there’s nothing _to_ say - a sad curl bending his torn lips at the corners as he sighs. “I know this was close,” and his fingers twine with Leonard’s at the cool edge of the bedsheet, strong and steadfast where his voice trails off; “close like it’s never been before.”

Leonard breathes once, twice; long drags off the world like as if it’ll give him strength, give him what he fears losing the most. “You shouldn’t have lasted that long,” he finally manages, because it’s true, and it’s what he’s thinking, but it still doesn’t put his worst nightmares into words. “No one should be able to last that long.”

“But I did.” And that’s their story, in the end - they’re what no one should be, what no one should do, and yet they carry on. They manage the impossible, see the inconceivable through to the end. They are gods of their own reality; only Leonard’s not sure he believes in them enough to keep from wondering, worrying, _agonizing_ over the day when they’ll both fall from grace, and in plummeting, perish. “I _did_.” That hand, though, where it curls around his own - it’s so warm, so firm, fucking determined like the orbit ‘round the sun, and with that anchor, that weight, so _close_ \- there’s no room left for doubt. “Because every time I wanted to give up, to give _in_ , I’d think of you.”

“I’d think of _you_ ,” Jim continues, leaning into Leonard’s neck, his lips moving just above the clavicle, tasting every beat, every breath, and Leonard wraps an arm around his lover’s shoulders, pulls him in closer, keeps him safe, sound - makes certain he’s still there. “And nothing they did would matter. Because no amount of pain, no amount of torment,” and Jim knows - _has_ to know - when Leonard’s pulse leaps, when anger, guilt, fear seep back into his veins, because it’s the brush of his lashes against the base of his throat, the press of rough lips, scabbed but sure against his Adam’s apple, that quells the rush, the anguish; it’s Jim that brings him home. “None of it could take away the fact that I had to hold on,” Jim nuzzles him just a tad, tender and possessive and eager, “so I could make it home to you.”

Leonard shudders, buries his face in Jim’s hair, biting his lip against the sting behind his eyes, trying not to see the ghost of him, the harsh cut of Jim’s bones where his flesh hangs limp around them, or his skin, translucent, save where the bruises blossom and the lacerations tear him to shreds.

“The ship,” Jim whispers, reaching up to wrap long fingers around Leonard’s wrists; “she’d find another captain.” And it wrenches, pulls in Leonard’s chest, because it’s blasphemously true. “The crew, they’d mourn, but they’d move on. But you...”

And he wants to stop Jim as he struggles, strains against the last of his healing wounds, the fragile skin masking his brush with mortality, but before he can move, can speak, Jim’s palm is cupped against the stubble at his cheek, his eyes so wide they take Leonard in, and he’s tired, so fucking _tired_ ; he’s spent everything in him fighting for Jim, and Jim, it seems, had done the very same - they’re empty, the both of them, except for each other, and Leonard’s just selfish enough to watch his lover wince a little as he shifts, as he stretches, so long as he doesn’t have to surrender the heat, the love of that touch.

“You’re all I have, Bones, and I don’t...” He can’t say it; he can’t say it because he’s James Tiberius Kirk, he can’t say it because it _cannot_ be _said_ , doesn’t have to be. As they always have, they can do without the words; Leonard knows what Jim means to say, knows it where it resonates as truth somewhere in the middle of his chest. “I couldn’t do that to you,” Jim rasps, his head sliding down to rest against Leonard’s sternum, right at the center of him, the center of everything, the heart of his world; “not while I could still fight, still _hope_ that there was a way out, a way _back_.”

Something in Leonard breaks at that, finally stretches and snaps, and if there are tears, they don’t matter - if there are words, they’re only sounds, mere moans; and when he clings to the only thing he has left - in this world or the next - all that exists is the moment, and the two of them together, wrapped inside it’s warm embrace.

_________________________________________

 

**_...I can always be found..._ **

 

He hears the shuffling of socks on tiling before he registers that the other side of the bed is empty; it’s a rare thing that Jim’s up before Leonard, but given the circumstances, he doesn’t even look to see the time before he rolls back over and buries himself in the musk of Jim’s cologne where it clings to his pillowcase, mingles with the hint of his sweat and the strong waft of coffee from the kitchen - and for a moment, one blissful moment, Leonard can pretend that this is all there is in the whole goddamn universe: his own breath and the darkness behind his eyes, with the scent of Jim next to him, and the rest of Jim just a room away.

He draws himself up, lets his feet dangle over the side of the mattress, and the footsteps echo closer, pause with the creak of the bed behind him, with warm hands on his shoulders that squeeze before sliding, wrapping around his neck loosely. There’s a kiss pressed just below his ear, and soft blond hair tickles at the nape of his neck, reminds him he’s alive, why he’s still breathing.

“How are you doing?” Jim asks softly, his voice filled with the kind of sorrow that hardens into strength and softens into compassion at the very same time, the kind of heart that keeps them both going through it all, that always has. And Leonard doesn’t know the right kind of words to tell the man he loves how grateful he is for it, for _him_ \- but he is. By God, but he _is_.

“Better.” And he loves that about them, the way they work - the way they exist in tandem, in tune; loves that the lies between them mean nothing, because they’re transparent, never bought - that they know when to let sleeping dogs lie, when to let the questions die and when to simply be, simply love, and let that swell into enough.

He’s not better, of course he isn’t; but in time, with Jim next to him, ever-present - in time, he will be.

“Would it have been different?” he dares to ask, the unspoken question that hangs over him like a black cloud of shame, the shadow of the paths he’d left untrod in his life, the roads untaken. “If we’d have gone and enlisted like everyone else?” All of his friends, all of Jim’s - they’d all done what most people they’d known had - signed themselves over to Starfleet and left Planet Earth behind. And Leonard had never questioned it before, the decision to stay put, with solid ground beneath his feet, with his practice in the country, with real, honest-to-god sunlight beating on his back and the man he cherished more than life itself at his side every step of the way - but now, he can’t help but wonder if that uniform, if that commission and the vast possibilities, the unknowns of the universe would have changed things, would have changed _this_. “Would we have found something, learned something, that could have...”

“You can’t think like that,” Jim cuts him off before he goes any farther, before he says things that don’t need saying, that’ll only make it worse. “You can’t. This isn’t your fault. It’s not _anyone’s_ fault.”

“We can’t know what might have happened,” Jim murmurs, running the bridge of his nose just behind Leonard’s ear, breathing in and sending shivers down his spine; “but space isn’t the answer to death, Bones. It’s not the answer to _anything_. It’s just another place to run from the things you can’t change. And running...” he trails, inhales a shaky breath as the fingers against his collarbone tighten, tense; “running doesn’t solve anything. Running wouldn’t have saved _her_.”

And it’s truth in those words, a naked truth that means all the more coming from a man who has every reason to hate what Leonard’s suggesting, to rail against the mere mention of it; he’s lost enough to the vast emptiness of space, suffered too many times at its hands, and Leonard’s almost hates himself for asking, for bringing it up - except that he needs to hear it, needs to _know_ it, and needs Jim to be the one to put his soul to some small, subtle ease.

“She would rather have had you all these years, near her, loving her, being with her,” Jim whispers, and the sound of it, the presence of it has weight; “than have seen you out scouring the stars, trying to postpone what’s coming for us all, in the end.”

He reaches over his shoulder, laces his fingers into Jim’s; “You’re right.”

And Jim, he only touches soft, giving lips to Leonard’s fingers, each one in turn, before asking: “You up for breakfast?”

“Yeah,” he answers with a nod, his lips tight as he squints his eyes shut, vows to leave the sadness behind for now as best he can; lets Jim take his hands and pull him up from the edge of the bed. The light cracks through the curtains, old fashioned things that she’d picked out for them forever and a day ago, and it’s a new day, he reminds himself - and because Jim steps forward, so does he.


End file.
